Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City and Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York state had a disagreement.
The mayor wanted the power to publish the names and evaluations of all teachers in the city, as happened earlier this year when the New York City Department of Education released the single-number ratings of 18,000 teachers, based solely on test scores. The mayor says the public has a right to know the job ratings of every teacher. The teachers’ union (among others) objected because the ratings are highly flawed and inaccurate; and it humiliates teachers to have their ratings made public. Others objected to the public release because the job evaluations of police, firefighters and corrections officers are shielded by state law; why single out teachers and open their ratings to the public? Even Bill Gates wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times opposing public release last winter, a day before the ratings went public, on the ground that they are useful only as part of a discussion between teachers and their supervisors about how to improve. Public release turns them into a tool for humiliating people, not a means of helping them become better at their work.
The governor argued that the parents have a right to know the ratings of their child’s teachers, but that the ratings should not be made public.
The state legislature overwhelmingly passed a law reflecting the governor’s view. The ratings will not be published but parents have a right to know the ratings of their child’s teacher.
Mayor Bloomberg became very angry that the Legislature sided with the governor and rejected his view. So he said on a weekly talk show that the city would contact every one of the city’s parents or guardians of 1.1 million children and make their ratings known. Many people saw this response as the reaction of a petulant billionaire who can’t stand to lose. Be that as it may, the New York City Department of Education now has the burden of enacting a policy or program to do as the mayor directs because New York City has mayoral control and the department must carry out the mayor’s wishes, no matter how odd they may seem and no matter if they violate the spirit of the law that was just passed.
GothamSchools published an account of how the Department of Education intends to carry out the mayor’s wishes. It appears that every principal will be required to contact every parent to inform them of their right to know, but it is not clear how or if this information will be released. Maybe it won’t be, as that would clearly be illegal.
Based on this article, it appears that the mayor thinks that parents are consumers who should be able to go teacher-shopping. If they don’t like Mr. Smith’s rating, they should be able to transfer their child into Ms. Jones’s class because she has a higher rating. The problem here is obvious and I wonder if this occurred to the mayor. Unlike a business, where consumers may decide to shift their patronage, a teacher can accommodate a limited number of children. If a school has 500 students, and Ms. Jones has the highest rating in the building, her classroom can still enroll only a certain number of students, between 25 and 34, depending on the grade. What happens if the parents of 200 students or all 500 students want to be in her class? It doesn’t work, and it makes no sense.
Furthermore, given what we already know are the huge margins of error built into the ratings, Ms. Jones may not be the best teacher at all. The consumers may be misinformed.
Mayor Bloomberg has a faith in the value of the standardized test scores that shows how little he knows about measurement. The scores measure student performance, not teacher quality. When used to assess teacher quality, the rankings produced are inaccurate, unreliable and unstable. A teacher who appears to be effective one year may not be effective the next year. And the more that schools use test scores to rate teachers, the more they incentivize behaviors that actually undermine good education.
As it happens, I just read a blog by a teacher in Los Angeles who announced that he had changed his mind about using test scores to evaluate teachers. He concluded that they are misleading, that they needlessly demoralize almost all teachers, and that they aren’t good for students or for education.
I agree with him.
Diane
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“The scores measure student performance, not teacher quality. When used to assess teacher quality, the rankings produced are inaccurate, unreliable and unstable. ”
No, the scores don’t “measure” student performance as that is a logical impossibility. Measuring means quantifying, putting on a scale that which cannot be quantified, the act of “learning” something. The assessment itself is part of the learning process and in the assessing process the “measurement” automatically becomes “outdated” or inaccurate as the student is still “learning” while taking the test.
“When used. . . are inaccurate, unreliable and unstable applies not only to teacher rankings but to student rankings which are what grades and grading are all about. And the whole process is UNETHICAL as to attempt to draw a conclusion from a standardized test other than to say that at a certain point in time the student interacted with an assessment, whether paper and pencil or computerized and got X amount out of Y amount correct. That’s about all you can use it for. Now were it to be used with the student as a holistic teaching device it might be a different thing, but why would it have to be standardized?
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Why is not some enterprising journalist or blogger not filing a FOIA request on the projected cost of what the Mayor is demanding – how much will it cost for principals to contact the parents of over 1 million students? If the response is that principals are on fixed salaries and thus there is no additional cost, then what is the opportunity cost of principals or their designees carrying out this mandate versus other things that could be being done that actually have a direct impact upon the education of children.
Why does the Mayor think the best way to advance meaningful education is to try to pit SOME parents against teachers?
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Has the NY Legislature addressed the issue of parental rights once it has been disclosed that their child is in the class of a teacher labeled “ineffective”? In Florida, the solution is to offer the parents the right to enroll their child in virtual school instead. There seems to be an obvious profit motive in informing parents of their child’s teacher’s evaluation.
What’s even scarier in New York is that parents are only being informed about the portion of a teacher’s evaluation based on a single standardized test. Because value added rankings are based on a curve, a certain percentage of teachers will always be labeled ineffective even if their students showed learning gains.
I don’t see the point of informing parents of bogus value added rankings, only to have them show up in the principal’s office and told there is no more room in Mr. “Highly Effective’s” classroom. It will turn into an administrative nightmare as overburdened administrative staff will have the burden placed upon them to contact parents (an act the equivalent of finding Big Foot for some students) and then dealing with irate parents who have no understanding of the inaccuracies of the value added rankings.
This Mayor’s motive is teacher bashing/bullying pure and simple.
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I do not find this supposed compromise that the governor forged the least bit acceptable. Who is going to stop the parents from posting my number on Facebook or Twitter? How can I fight the battle of social media when I may not even see it?
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I see a few thousand robo-call/ call center contracts in the making and money down the drain. In the schools where I’ve worked, I’ve found 3-4 incorrect addresses and more than half the phone numbers missing, incorrect or disconnected. It was extremely frustrating and this was for a class of 25-30 students. When multiplied out by 5 classes the numbers started to add up. Now, what does that look like for a million students? And why are the individual schools responsible? If Bloomie wants it, let him pay and do it. Why do I sense this money will be coming from the local school budget? Good luck New York!
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Mayor Bloomberg is acting and sounding just like a rebellious teenager!
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If Bloomberg’s demands go through, you can bet your boots many principals will speak their minds to the parents. They will tell the parents how flawed these ratings are.
Bloomberg may already have thought of this. If he makes principals call all parents AND follow a script, there’s going to be trouble. They are principals, not telemarketers.
This is his last scream, or one of his last, and it won’t leave good memories. He won’t go down in history well.
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When is out anyway? How much longer? Let’s come up with a VAM score for him and have his staff call all the citizens of NYC. He is an arrogant egotistical bloviator.
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The next mayoral election is 2013. The mayor has 18 months left. NYC used to have a term limits law of two terms only. He persuaded the City Council to ignore two referenda on the matter. Having more money than the rest of us can imagine affects the ego.
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